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The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray

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AS HOLLYWOOD parties go, the one in full swing this past spring in a handsome, Georgian Revival home off Sunset Boulevard was an anomaly.

No agents circulated, no studio executives haunted the hallways. The food was lasagna and fried chicken; the beverages, Mexican beer and bottled seltzer - with the seltzer proving the more popular. Instead of dizzying references to ''gross points,'' ''back-end deals,'' scripts ''in turnaround'' and multimillion-dollar movie deals, the talk concerned the fortunes of Chicago sports teams and New York rock bands, and the only ''creative products'' under scrutiny were baby pictures.

If any aspect of ''the industry'' was being bantered about, it was the return to the employment ranks of the party's co-host, Bill Murray, who had, earlier that day, finished filming for ''Scrooged'' - an outlandish adaptation of the Dickens Christmas classic that will be released on Wednesday. Coincidentally, three other film comedies featuring other former ''Saturday Night Live'' regulars were then nearing completion: ''Coming to America,'' starring Eddie Murphy; ''Caddyshack II,'' starring Chevy Chase, and ''My Stepmother Is an Alien,'' starring Dan Aykroyd. To celebrate this serendipitous event, Murray and Peter Aykroyd, an actor-composer who is Dan's younger brother, had decided on this first-time-ever gathering of ''Saturday Night Live'' alumni.

A picture of genial abandon in rumpled khakis, football jersey and sneakers, Murray was urging Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman and Chevy Chase to drop their ''reserves of cool'' on the dance floor and ''get down!'' Murray's warmth is disarming. Chase, for instance, once considered Murray a rival, and the feeling was mutual. Murray was hired at ''Saturday Night Live'' in January 1977, just five weeks after Chase left for a movie career. The pressure Murray felt in trying to supplant his predecessor flared into backstage fisticuffs when Chase returned as a guest host for the third season of ''Saturday Night Live.'' Now, the two are thoroughly at ease with each other. Even Eddie Murphy, a ''Saturday Night Live'' latecomer whose box-office magnetism eclipses that of most of his associates, is meek in Murray's presence.

Bill Murray is considered by his colleagues to be a man who has made peace with any private demons he might have had, someone who has brought his personal life and his career into enviable concord. Slightly disheveled and projecting what Richard Donner, the director of ''Scrooged,'' calls ''a woolly Zen wisdom,'' Murray acts as a kind of father figure to the ''Saturday Night Live'' alumni.

REFLECTING the skepticism of a generation that grew up on television, Murray's hu-mor has always brought wryly heroic dimension to everyday nonconformity. His performances on ''Saturday Night Live'' were not known for their subtlety, but they ultimately hinged on his forte: discernment. Gilda Radner won a following with her lucid little-girl pathos, and Dan Aykroyd was an instinctive satirist, a craftsman who disappeared behind deft depictions of, say, a huckster on television. But Murray -who occasionally wrote his own material, as did most of the ''Saturday Night Live'' regulars - was always starkly personal.

Whether he was a lavishly inept lounge singer on ''Saturday Night Live'' (warbling ''Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars, gimme those Star Wars, don't let 'em >ennnnd'') or a benignly anarchic camp counselor in his screen debut, ''Meatballs'' (1979), the quintessential Bill Murray portrayal has the actor simultaneously immersed in his role and commenting drolly on it.

Unlike any other actor on ''Saturday Night Live,'' Murray would permit viewers to see the actual process of assuming a character's essence - and the nakedness of the effort was startling. If his viewers had doubted for one instant the completeness of Murray's investment in the role, his attempt at commentary would probably have lapsed into insolence.

Although Murray's sketches on ''Saturday Night Live'' endeared him to a generation addicted to irreverence, it was his 1984 role in ''Ghostbusters'' that established him as one of the most interesting comic film stars in a generation. Dan Aykroyd, who created the characters for ''Ghostbusters,'' wrote the first draft of the movie with his then-sidekick John Belushi and Bill Murray in mind.

Besides being one of the most successful film comedies in history (grossing more than $300 million), ''Ghostbusters'' won Murray critical raves for his goofy-gallant depiction of a spirit exterminator - a portrayal that demanded he be convincing as a heroic protagonist, romantic leading man and comic foil for an array of special-effects hobgoblins.

''The broad strokes kept 'em in their seats, but it was the tenderness toward his comrades and the vulnerability of his howling he'd been 'slimed' that hooked the crowds but good,'' notes Michael O'Donoghue, the former head writer of ''Saturday Night Live'' and a guest at the party. (With Mitchell Glazer, O'Donoghue is co-screenwriter of ''Scrooged.'') In the four years since ''Ghostbusters,'' Murray and his wife, Mickey, have been raising two boys, ages 6 and 3, and leading a stable family life. He is one famous funnyman who rarely agrees to be interviewed and has a strong aversion to the ''false fuss'' of the Hollywood publicity mill. He has also maintained a first-rate box-office reputation, and was able to command a $6 million fee for ''Scrooged.''

I'M A SUCKER FOR hero roles, the big brother parts, especially superheroes - providing they have flaws,'' says Murray one early spring morning, seated in his trailer on Paramount Pictures' Hollywood lot.

In ''Scrooged,'' Murray's miserly crank of the 1980's is Frank Cross, president of the International Broadcasting Company, the youngest network chief in the annals of the industry. A man who loathes Christmas for everything but its commercial uses, Cross churns out such holiday programming fare as ''Howard Cosell at the Sistine Chapel'' and ''Bob Goulet's Old Fashioned Cajun Christmas'' in between quiz shows like ''Guess My Disease'' and ''Run for Sex.''

''I've seen TV from behind the scenes,'' Murray continues, ''so I draw from that a bit to expose its hypocrisies. As with Frank, most of TV's programming ideas come from the afternoon edition of The New York Post. He's a crumb, a pig, yet audiences who know the story know he's gonna change.''

Prior to Frank Cross, Murray's most flawed movie hero was Larry Darrell, in a 1984 remake of Somerset Maugham's novel ''The Razor's Edge.'' Darrell is a spiritually hungry World War I aviator from Chicago who, after seeing his best friend killed, adopts a mystical Eastern gospel of nonattachment. The movie quietly sank into oblivion, many of those who did see it deciding that Murray was ineffective when playing against type and not being funny.

Early screenings of ''Scrooged'' have garnered varied reactions. During sneak previews this summer, 93 percent of those surveyed found the movie ''very good'' - the highest positive rating Paramount has ever received in a survey of this kind. More recently, the responses at press screenings in New York have ranged from ovations to disgruntlement.

The obvious question of whether Bill Murray can shine as someone other than himself is inevitably intertwined with the issue of who Bill Murray is. Murray himself explains that both his choice of material and approach in playing a contemporary Scrooge are rooted in the surreal emotional vocabulary of a kid raised on video.

''I didn't grow up reading a lot of Charles Dickens, although I got a dose of 'A Tale of Two Cities' in school,'' Murray emphasizes, slouched in a director's chair. ''Most folks will tell you the best dramatic version of 'A Christmas Carol' is the 1951 Alastair Sim movie on the late show every Christmas week, but my own favorite is the animated Mr. Magoo's Scrooge. Maybe it's just me,'' he concludes with a chuckle, ''but I thought there was a lot of truth in the exaggerated vulnerability of the near-sighted little cartoon guy.''

WHILE FRIENDS like Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have lately drawn criticism for making too many movies, Murray has raised eyebrows in the film industry for making too few. All told, he has starred in only seven features since 1979, while filling cameo roles in four: ''Mr. Mike's Mondo Video,'' ''The Jerk,'' ''Little Shop of Horrors'' and, most notably, ''Tootsie.''

''Billy has been very discerning, very instinctive,'' says the producer Sydney Pollack, who cast him in ''Tootsie.'' ''These days, when people can jump too readily at big deals, his are distinguishing traits. It's funny, but I initially resisted putting Billy in 'Tootsie.' Dustin Hoffman and I met him at a party in 1982, enjoying his affable nature, and as we were leaving Dustin turned to me and said, 'Gee, I think he'd be a great roommate for my character.'

''My initial opinion was that Billy was just a strong sketch player. It wasn't until I screened his films at Dustin's urging that I saw what a satisfying actor he could be. Even when those around him are merely filling their parts, Billy always gives a very sustained characterization. There's reality and candor, plus scene-to-scene growth. . . . He's got a complex and original range that puts him in a special category - a completely believable comic illuminator.''

Given the phenomenal success of ''Ghostbusters'' - and the financial independence that afforded him - Murray was able to do what he wanted during the four years between that blockbuster and ''Scrooged.'' He took his wife, Mickey, and baby, Homer, to France for a year, and his second son, Luke, was born while they were living in Paris. When they resumed residence in a renovated farmhouse in the Hudson River Valley, Murray would regularly disappear into his tiny office to read historical fiction and the novels of Irish writers.

Sporadically, though, Murray was lured from his lair to take small acting parts. He appeared in several public readings in Manhattan organized by the playwright-director Timothy Mayer, and in a production of Bertolt Brecht's ''A Man's a Man,'' at Mayer's Hyde Park Festival Theater in upstate New York. But the rest of his sabbatical was devoted to his family, caring for his mother during a protracted illness, and spending time with his far-flung siblings - five brothers and three sisters - with whom he remains extremely close. More than once, Mets fans were startled to encounter Murray and his older brother Brian, also an actor, on the subway en route to weekend games.

Murray plowed through dozens of proffered screenplays, but he couldn't bring himself to accept any of them. ''For each year that Bill didn't work, his fee probably went up - until he could ask for and get $6 million in cash for 'Scrooged,' '' says the producer Art Linson. ''That might sound like a lot of money, considering he received more for 'Scrooged' than the producer, director and cast combined. But when it costs a studio $15 million to $20 million for publicity and prints just to open a major picture, it might just be a bargain in Billy's case - because his name across the marquee will sell over $10 million worth of tickets in the opening three to four days. The only two actors, serious or comic, who can guarantee that degree of turnout in 1988 are Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy. That factor is the source of Billy's power in Hollywood. Not that he plays on it. Normally, unless he's giving input on his own pictures, he ignores it.''

Murray himself feels that ''Scrooged'' was well worth waiting for, since the movie permits him to deliver a substantial theme in a whimsical package. ''For now,'' he contends, ''the goal is to cut through the glamour - which has its place, I guess - and give the public a little food for thought. . . . There are moments in the Dickensian morality of 'Scrooged' where you have the creepy chance to contemplate your ruin -the bottom of your future.''

Up close, Murray's rough visage is not conventionally handsome, yet there is something in the solidity of his gaze that often makes it so. His musical burrs and thoughtful mein reveal a man accustomed to the darkness and the light.

Beginning next month, Murray will be shooting the sequel to ''Ghostbusters.'' He is pleased with the script ''because after four drafts it returns the story to a human scale, with subtlety and no silly explosions at the end. Like 'Scrooged,' it's a story about innocence restored, and good values, and the power of faith in ordinary people. It sounds corny but I'd like all my stuff from here on out to be things you wouldn't be afraid to let your kids' kids discover decades from now. Like I discovered 'A Tale of Two Cities' or even Mr. Magoo.''

MICKEY KELLY, A former talent coordinator on the ''The Tonight Show'' and ''The Dick Cavett Show,'' is a self-assured brunette. She and Murray were married on Jan. 24, 1981, at 4:30 A.M. in a Las Vegas ''elopement'' - engineered by the actor - that had begun as a spin through the San Fernando Valley to find a Mexican restaurant. As the drive turned into a puzzling tour, Mickey Kelly's stomach grumbled and her mood grew grim (''I thought he was trying to drive me insane'').

These days, in a village by the Hudson, Mickey Kelly runs a custom furniture shop while Murray tends to his ''screen thing.'' On a recent autumn afternoon, she is off running errands while her husband splits luncheon and babysitting chores with the housekeeper.

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With Homer still at school and Luke dispatched for a nap, Murray commandeers the gleaming, country-style kitchen to prepare a highly touted rissota con Champagne. As a splendid sun advances upon the luxuriant back lawn of his home, he sets a table on the veranda with linen placemats and ceramic dishware. The meal is tasty, the herbal tea flavorful, and the conversation meditative as Murray reviews the quirky milestones that helped mold the man he has become.

He was born on Sept. 20, 1951, in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, to Edward and Lucille Murray, both descendants of Irish immigrant stock. Edward Murray, a lumber salesman, was a diabetic and died when Billy was 17.

''I feel a little different from the rest of my family,'' the actor confesses as he seats himself on the porch and breaks off a piece of brioche. ''Having the big success made me feel different. I ended up doing my father's job in some ways.

''Because of the diabetes, my father was an interesting combination of a thin, fragile man and a disciplinarian. With a lot of kids, you always feel there's a party going on, but obviously we needed to be reined in for sanity's sake. At the dinner table, he was very dry and quiet, but always triggered to laugh. It was just very difficult to figure out what would do it. It had to be good. It was like he was waiting, and he'd wait forever if need be.''

In the meantime, bread had to be won and household expectations kept within strict bounds. Christmas came to exemplify the Murrays' necessarily austere disposition.

''I never asked for toys,'' Murray recalls. ''Asking for toys was out of the question; they were low priorities. It's not that we were denied anything so much as the fact that we knew not to make requests. For Christmas you got essentials: school clothes. Whenever toys surfaced at all, they were pretty much inherited.''

Neither Billy nor his siblings possessed the means to bestow decent gifts of their own. ''The closest any of us ever came to an allowance was finding change under the couch cushions, so I used to shop each Christmas with a single dollar, getting everybody something that cost a dime. Once Brian had all these significant-looking presents in big crisp boxes under the tree, while ours resembled badly wrapped body parts. Turned out he'd gotten scrap wood from Dad's lumberyard and nailed it into a bunch of big blocks.

''The worst year in my case was the one I bought two pounds of peanuts from the corner drugstore, and I wrapped them in tinfoil. It was a terribly lazy move for a 10-year-old to pull. And I kept going in each day before Christmas and taking a few nuts from each package, so by the time the day rolled around the matter had grown disgraceful.'' Now settled into a comfortable country house, Murray relates these stories with a mixture of giggles and shudders. He grows grim, however, when he touches on his 13th Christmas.

''That was my 'unloved year,' '' he recalls. ''I got everything I wanted, which was really only a clock radio, but I was in some sort of a state, going through a phase. They say the middle kid gets the least attention, but that can be accentuated in a house overrun with them. They gave me all these things, and I just sat there with a puppy- dog's long face. Then I got even more attention because I wasn't happy. Then they got angry.'' He shrugs. ''See, I was crying for help.''

He read voraciously, his favorites ''were biographies for children of American heroes, all the guys like Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok and Davy Crockett. I read them over and over, 'cause they were all poor kids when they started. The book that made the biggest impression was the one about Crockett, because he ran away from home as a kid, pulled it off, and his parents missed him when he came back.'' He gives a huge smile. ''That's the kind of happy ending that sticks with me.'' He began taking summer jobs in his early teens to pay for his tuition in a Roman Catholic high school. Following in his brothers' footsteps, he made $3.50 a bag caddying at the luxurious Indian Hill Club in nearby Winnetka. Much later, he was able to pour his impressions of the job into his 1980 movie, ''Caddyshack,'' which his brother Brian wrote with Doug Kenney and Harold Ramis.

''The movie was knowledgeable about golf,'' Murray says, ''but it should have had more about the stratification of country-club life. The kids who were members of the club were despicable; you couldn't believe the attitude they had. I mean, you were literally walking barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans, carrying some privileged person's sports toys on your back for five miles.''

The 1960's were a difficult time for him, Murray suspects, not only because of the financial straits the family was in. There were the illnesses as well. Because they were seldom openly acknowledged, his father's diabetes, a sister's polio and his mother's several miscarriages heightened his anxiety and his compassion.

''My sister limps slightly now,'' he says quietly. ''The last time I was home, somebody had developed these old home movies that had her walking with braces when she was 2. God, it was breathtaking. . . . Sitting there and watching it with her, it was like there was a jack on the inside of my brain that was spreading my skull apart.''

With that, he gets up and clears away the dishes, hurrying into the kitchen. When he returns, his mood is lighthearted, and he launches into reminiscences of the minor mischief he got into as a juvenile, ranging from accidentally totaling a neighbor's car at 13 to getting punished the following year for heavy petting with an older girl.

He began to focus his energies in increasingly public ways, becoming the lead singer in a rock band called the Dutch Masters, and taking part in high-school and community-theater dramatic productions. Dropping out of college, he gravitated toward his brother Brian's bohemian flat in the Old Town section of Chicago and joined Second City improvisational workshops, eventually becoming a full cast member.

Scrambling to make ends meet, Murray was convicted at age 21 of selling mari-juana and was placed on probation. He managed to get his drug-related mistakes out of his system early on, and latched onto acting as a vocational anchor.

In 1974, John Belushi, a friend from Second City, got Murray signed on as a regular on ''The National Lampoon Show,'' a comedy revue. Lorne Michaels, creator of ''Saturday Night Live,'' visited the show several times while scouting talent for his program, but passed over Murray in favor of Belushi. In 1977, after Belushi and Dan Aykroyd began straying from the late-night showcase to seek their movie fortunes, Murray was finally summoned to New York to fill out the lineup.

He remained ''the new guy'' for the longest time - until he stepped into his Manhattan shower one morning in 1978, just prior to the last show of the season. He picked up a Christmas present Belushi's wife, Judy Jacklin, had given him - a microphone-shaped bar of soap on a rope - and suddenly he improvised an addled script about a husband who invites his unfaithful wife and her lover into the shower stall for a mock ''This Is Your Life'' nightclub routine. A sensational bit of homespun surrealism, it hit the airwaves with a wallop that weekend and instantly transformed Bill Murray into the program's freshest star.

THE AFTERNOON IS abruptly chilly, the waning light turning Murray's wooded backyard into a tangle of shadows. He rises to pace around the porch.

''The last two years have been incredibly exciting and incredibly draining,'' he allows as Bark, his golden retriever, bounds out of the bushes toward him. He chases Bark around the yard a few times, displaying the rambunctiousness of a person half his age. Whether at home or on the set of ''Scrooged,'' Murray seems happiest when the child in him is tapped. There is a flip side to his exuberance, and it surfaces when someone attempts to abuse his openness.

''As the 'Scrooged' production was beginning,'' recalls Mitch Glazer, ''Billy asked O'Donoghue and me to go with him to this Mexican desert resort for a little male bonding. We did a lot of swimming and hiking, and Billy was really sweet to all the other guests, who loved meeting him. Unfortunately, there was this one Beverly Hills woman, a Rodeo Drive type who wore furs in the blazing sun, and she insisted on treating Billy like he was some ornament to her vacation.

''On her last day, she was pressing him for autographs and things, and Billy always complied. Finally, she cornered him for yet another autograph and he calmly said, 'O.K., but I'll have to have something in return. I get to throw you in the pool.' She laughed, saying, 'Sure, you do that,' as he signed - and then he went for it, escorting her toward the deep end of the pool. She dropped to the deck, gaping, but Billy reminded her that a bargain was a bargain, and he slipped his hands under her, rolling her - furs and all - into the water.''

As Bark disappears back into the underbrush, Murray ambles to the porch and reflects on the concerns he has wrestled with since ''Ghostbusters.''

''You know, the 'Ghostbusters' mania also coincided with my mother's retirement,'' he begins evenly. ''She's had this clerical job since my father died, and she took an early pension. But she had no sooner tried to finally enjoy life when she found she had cancer of the lymph nodes and needed massive chemotherapy. My mother is a real character, a talkative soul who can make friends with anyone, and she'd always been a massive influence on me. She's so animated, I even used to tape phone conversations with her in order to steal material!''

''The idea of her being gravely ill really threw me hard.'' Murray's voice falls to a near-whisper. But, he continues, his mother's hair loss, a result of chemotherapy, ''brought out her inner beauty.'' His hazel-blue eyes gleam and glaze slightly. ''I loved the way the light caught her head when she moved, and how you could almost see her thoughts etched on her skull.'' (After a brief recovery, Lucille Murray succumbed to cancer early this month.) Suddenly, the housekeeper calls out from inside the house. ''Luke is up from his nap!''

''Fab-u-lous!'' Murray answers. ''Does he wanna go for a walk by the river with Pop?''

''No!'' she replies. ''He is watching TV in the den!''

''Huh? What's so swell on TV that he can't fuss around with his father?!''

''He's watching the 'Ghostbusters' cartoons!''

Murray scratches his thinning hair. ''Damn,'' he mutters darkly. ''Just when you finally figure out what you're doing in the world, you have to start worrying about what you've done.''